Ep 155: James Talia, Louis Theroux, TV Board Games

James Talia talks to us all the way from London about the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross/Andrew Sachs controversy and what that means for the BBC. We take a look some TV-related board games that John’s found and have a look at the work of Louis Theroux. There’s some punchy news, the answer to the quiz and some Letters to Boxcutters, too.

Firstly, on the election, it was absolutely stunning when the result actually came in – what a fantastic result.

As for the “hologram”, what a fricken crock. It’s NOT a hologram. The guy in the studio would have been looking at a blank space – in fact, probably a monitor right next to the camera that cut to him, with the shot going to air. I can only imagine the red spot on the floor was so that he’d have an idea where to look.

As for what it was, we’re talking about an image composite with her on a shockingly bad blue-screen. Rather than running 35 cameras on her in a ‘little tent’, getting computers to render the morphs on the fly to match the position of the cameras in the studio, they would have got a much better execution of it if they’d simply hooked the couple of cameras in the main studio to a couple of cameras at her location – the exact same information they had to send across as they already had – with a blue-screen background on one side.

It’s just hyperbolic bullshit to call any of what they did a hologram. The capitol building on the desk was much better executed – because they were generating all that in a computer and didn’t have to capture live-action – but the figures they were actually showing were difficult to read and only helped to retard clear communication.

On to other more important matters. Much has been made of the spooky psychic abilities of The West Wing’s writers in its last two seasons. Earlier this year they admitted they’d based Matt Santos on Barack Obama after the latter’s 2004 covention speech.

Now, it gets even better! Obama has just announced his White House chief of staff will be Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel is a massively connected Democratic insider and congressman who was a senior political adviser in the Clinton White House.

AND… Emanuel was the inspiration for the character of Josh Lyman on The West Wing!